you won’t, then I shall have to.’ She looked at the Customs officer and leaned towards her with a conspiratorial air. ‘Is there someone I can talk to?’ she hissed, so that other passengers would not overhear. ‘In confidence?’
‘ Yes, of course, what about?’
‘ One of the other passengers, who I think is on drugs.’
Henry Christie and Karl Donaldson completed their witness statements relating to John Abbot’s death at about one o’clock that morning. The process had taken a couple of hours over numerous cups of sweet white coffee. Both men were exhausted, Henry in particular. He hadn’t slept properly for almost two days and his mind was beginning to play tricks with his eyes.
He finished rereading his statement, blinked repeatedly and said, ‘I’ve got to get some kip. My head’s a complete shed.’
‘ Me too,’ agreed Donaldson, yawning and stretching. His clothing reeked of smoke.
They were sitting at desks in the deserted CID office at Blackpool Central. Karen had left them about an hour before, completely wrecked herself.
Henry stood up. His joints creaked and clicked like an old man’s. He walked across to a window, rolling his shoulders. He watched his reflection as he approached; he hardly recognised himself, wasn’t sure I who he was seeing. A stranger. Someone who had changed drastically in the last eight months. A man who’d gone from being happily married with two beautiful daughters and a beautiful wife, a contented lifestyle and good job, to a rundown adulterer who hardly saw his kids and lived like a hermit in a shit-hole of a flat that smelled of cat piss.
The only constant was that he still had the same job.
He tried to pinpoint the exact moment at which his life had changed for the worse. He reckoned it was that bomb on the M6.
He gazed blankly out of the window; in his mind’s eye was every detail of that explosion and the faces of those kids. He knew now they were images that would stay with him for ever. And now he’d come full circle. Another explosion. Another motorway. And the link was I the same two men: himself and Hinksman.
You’re out there somewhere, he thought, and I want to find you. I want to hunt you down, but I don’t know where to start.
He sighed and turned back to Donaldson. ‘Where do we go from here?’
Before the FBI man could reply, the phone on the desk where he was sitting started to ring. Henry walked across and answered it. Two minutes later he hung up.
‘ Delete that last question,’ he quipped. ‘I might just have the answer to it. C’mon, grab yer coat.’
‘ Just one of those lucky things, really, if it turns out to be of any use that is,’ the detective said to Henry and Donaldson as, forty minutes later, he led them through Manchester Airport to the police holding area.
‘ Initially we just thought she was a run-of-the-mill punter — y’know, trying to get a bit of stuff through. We searched her luggage and found some coke, a bit of crack, some heroin. Then we searched her body orifices. Well, not me personally, but I’m told there wasn’t anything there that shouldn’t have been.’
‘ So why call us?’ Donaldson asked. He was beyond exhaustion. Really irritable.
The detective wasn’t to be fazed. He had a bit of a story to tell and he was going to tell it, no matter what. ‘Anyway, it was while a couple of female officers and a doctor were trying to search the girl that she started dropping names. She was scratching, kicking, all that shit, see, and she had to be forcibly restrained. Now she’s threatening them, saying they’ll get wasted for this, that she knows a hit man. A lot of rubbish on the face of it, but not when the names start coming.’
‘ Names like?’ asked Donaldson.
The detective smiled. ‘Hinksman? Well, we didn’t attach much importance to that one. Every bugger in Britain knows his name. But then she was bawling about Corelli, Dakin, Stanton, you, Sergeant Christie, someone called Kovaks and you, Mr Donaldson.’
‘ Oh,’ Henry and Donaldson said together.
‘ Starting saying things like the Mafia are giving you the run around. It was a lucky chance, really — she could easily have slipped into the system. It’s just that one of the female officers she was wrangling with remembered the names from the last time you two guys were down here.’
‘ And what’s the prisoner’s name?’ Henry asked.
‘ Er, Janine something-or-other. Fit little piece. If she wasn’t a druggie, I’d give her one.’
‘ Has she said anything else?’ asked Henry.
‘ There was one thing. She said she’d fucked your Chief Constable’s brains out. A lot of crap, like I said.’
‘ Let’s talk to her,’ said Henry.
The detective shook his head. ‘She’s still floating in the stratosphere.’ He pointed up to the sky. ‘Not fit to be interviewed.’
‘ But this is urgent,’ Henry said.
‘ Then you’ll need a Superintendent’s authority.’
Henry turned to Donaldson. ‘Karl, you are hereby promoted to the rank of Superintendent. Do you accept this?’
‘ I do.’
‘ May I interview the prisoner?’
‘ You may.’
Dave August was getting nowhere slowly. He had spent over an hour leafing through the Hinksman paperwork, and his eyes were getting gritty, his concentration drifting.
He closed the folder he was reading and picked up the next one, headed Unused Material. It contained all sorts of scraps of information, intelligence and musings even, which hadn’t been used in the court prosecution. It was a real mish-mash of stuff.
August swore softly and flicked through the contents with a grimace on his face. Then he closed the file, clasped his fingers, knuckles down, palms up on the desk-top and laid his forehead on the soft cushion they formed.
Within moments he was asleep.
The interview room had three chairs and a sturdy table with a tape recorder on it. Janine was sitting on one of the chairs with her elbows on the table, hands held loosely over the sides of her face and ears. Henry sat down opposite her. Donaldson remained standing, arms folded, like a sentry.
Henry placed an unopened pack of tapes on the table, together with a sealed plastic bag containing the drugs seized from her. ‘Janine, we’d like to have a chat with you.’ He spoke softly, seductively.
‘ Who the hell are you?’ she demanded.
‘ We’re here to help you.’ Henry noticed, with pleasure, that her hands were shaking. She was coming down.
‘ I’m up shit creek,’ she said. ‘I’ll go down for this — importing or whatever. You can’t do fuck-all for me.’
‘ Oh yes, we can,’ countered Henry. ‘But you’ve got to help us first. You see, this isn’t a recorded interview.’ He held up the unopened tapes. ‘It’s totally off the record.’
She gazed defiantly at him. ‘Oh yeah?’ she said disbelievingly. ‘So what can you do?’
‘ Two things actually,’ Henry said, matter-of-fact. ‘First we can give you a fix — I can see you need one — and the custody officer needn’t know about it; secondly, we can get all the charges against you dropped.’
Her eyes seemed to come alive. ‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘ Trust me, Janine, we have the power. All you need to do is answer some questions. When you’ve done that, we’ll slip you a fix. When we’ve verified what you say is correct, we’ll arrange for you to be released without charge.’
He paused, letting his words sink in, then resumed, his voice hard: ‘Thing is, if you don’t cooperate, Janine, you’ll get no smack and we will push hard for a custodial sentence. Just think — five years in prison, a lovely girl like you. We’ll tell the court what a bitch you were — obstructive, violent, all that sort of shit. Get the drift? So, you can come out of this a winner or a loser. Choice is yours, babe.’
